Shade

by Marilyn Peake

  “Are you sure? This necklace is extraordinary.”

  “It won’t do me any good on this side of the afterlife, though. I wish I could keep it, but I don’t seem to be able to keep any material possessions.”

  That didn’t pass the smell test to me. I thought he was lying. I didn’t trust him. “What are you talking about? You still own all your previous possessions. You’re still living here in your bedroom, aren’t you? I don’t even have complete privacy in my own bedroom because of that. My mom’s paying to rent this house and I have to share my room with a previous tenant. For privacy, teenagers go to their room, you know? I finally get a nice big attic bedroom and I have a roommate. You get to use everything you ever owned in life.”

  Anger flickered in Brandon’s eyes. “No, I don’t get to keep everything I owned. You don’t pay attention, do you? You get so wrapped up in your own problems, you don’t really pay attention to what’s going on around you, do you? When I showed you another version of this room—the pale green version with the small wooden bed that had nothing more than a patchwork quilt and one pillow on it, a simple wooden desk and chair—that was how this room looked when I lived here. All that’s gone now, along with most of my possessions. A few things remain.

  “After Neil passed away, my parents moved out of this house. Later owners remodeled the house and put this attic through huge changes. It’s been a storage area, a rented room, a mother-in-law suite and a teenaged girl’s bedroom. Lucky for you, you got the teenaged girl’s bedroom.

  “Here, let me show you something...” Brandon walked across the room. He pulled a bookshelf away from the wall. Behind it, there was a paneled door, about four feet high. He turned a knob and let it swing open. “The bookshelf used to be bolted to the wall. I had hidden the amulet behind a wall panel inside this closet, months before I died. The necklace had belonged to me. It had been my grandmother’s and she had bequeathed it to me in her will, but I always worried that someone would tease me for having a girl’s necklace or take it away from me because it was such an expensive piece of jewelry. I worried a lot that my mom would take it away from me.”

  Brandon paused. “My parents weren’t any better than your mom. They were drinkers, always leaving me at home to babysit Neil while they went out to bars. My dad could be pretty abusive when he was drunk and they were always broke because my dad kept losing jobs. My mom stayed home to raise me and Neil, but she never seemed happy about it and drank quite a bit at home.

  “My grandmother on my dad’s side of the family was the most dependable and loving person in my entire life. The amulet meant more to me than jewelry. I was a masculine guy; I wasn’t about to wear the necklace. And I wasn’t ever going to sell it, so I didn’t care how much it was worth. The necklace meant love to me. It reminded me of my grandmother; and my grandmother had left it for me, so it reminded me that someone had loved me. I think that’s why, after I died, the necklace took on powers. I have a theory that the necklace will lose its power to communicate after I move on from Purgatory to wherever I’m supposed to go. I think that it’s been imbued with special powers to help me communicate with the living in order to accomplish something I’m supposed to accomplish.” Brandon shrugged his shoulders. “That’s my theory, anyway.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I suppose I felt kind of selfish. I’d been through a lot. I was still going through a lot. Annie was my best friend. I loved her, even though I hardly knew her. And she was missing.

  I wanted my brand new, huge, gorgeous attic bedroom to myself. I didn’t want to share it with a ghost guy. And I didn’t want the burden of having to help him make amends. From the Afterlife. From Purgatory. I mean, come on, how weird is that?

  I wasn’t as gracious as I might have been, certainly not as gracious as I had been to Annie when she told me about her faeries. I shared a little bit about myself, told Brandon how I had made up stories at school about having a grandmother who took me to Ireland, told him how much I wished I actually had a loving grandmother like his, and said I’d do my best to help him out. I accepted the amulet, knowing already that I’d treasure it forever, and showed Brandon how to use cell phones.

  The door to the secret closet hung open. I didn’t really care about it at first. I think I was pissed off that my private attic space had so many secret things about which I knew nothing, it made me feel like an outsider. I already felt like an outsider in my own family; I needed to feel like this room belonged to me. I needed for Brandon to be the outsider.

  We went over to the window seat and sat around for about an hour or so, trying out different things on my cell phone. I texted Mary Jane a message to show Brandon how similar that was to the messages he sent me through the amulet. He laughed when my cell phone pinged and it turned out I had gotten a message back from Mary Jane. He marveled at my explanation of how far away Mary Jane lived and how cell phone towers transmit messages.

  I teased him over his surprised reaction. “You’re living in the afterlife and you’re impressed by cell phone transmissions?”

  “You don’t understand. I was thrust into the afterlife. I hardly understand anything about it at all. I’m kind of lost, actually. I don’t even know how to move out of Purgatory. There’s no map or set of directions or anything. But I remember my life on Earth. I was alive from 1959 to 1975. Technology was considered booming back then; but, from what I understand, it was nothing like what’s happening right now in your time. When I think back on my own life, sitting around listening to vinyl record albums and talking on telephones connected to wires in the wall, your cell phone amazes me.”

  I had an idea. “Music albums? Oh my God, you want to see how easy it is to play music now?”

  I clicked into my playlist, then clicked onto Adele’s Set Fire to the Rain. The song started to play.

  Brandon said, “Oh my God, is that thing playing music?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Wow. What else can it do?”

  I asked him, “Did you play board games when you were alive?”

  “Sometimes. I played them with my friends sometimes, and I played them with Neil. I mostly played little kid board games with Neil, and I was teaching him how to play checkers when...”

  I interrupted him. “OK, well, look at this...” I showed Brandon some cell phone games. He especially liked the word games.

  After playing a round of Words with Friends with Mary Jane, playing as if he was me, Brandon suddenly looked up. “Hey, did you ever call Annie on her cell phone after she went missing?”

  I answered, “Yeah, a couple of times. It went straight to voice mail, though.”

  “Voice mail?”

  “Yeah. Ummm ... If someone doesn’t answer their cell phone, an automated message asks if you’d like to leave a message. If you want to leave one, it records it for the person who owns the cell phone.”

  Brandon asked, “Did you leave a message for Annie?”

  “No. Most teenagers prefer that their friends don’t leave a message because they have to look up those messages. If I call and hang up, she’ll get a message right on her phone that she missed my message.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, never mind. But I did try to call her.”

  “Did you keep trying?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I already called.”

  In the moment of silence that followed that answer, I realized I should try to call her again. “OK, I’ll try again.” I fed her number into my phone and put the whole thing on speaker.

  The phone was answered in seconds. Thrilled, I blurted out, “Annie? Annie? Is that you?”

  A gruff male voice came over the speaker. He wasn’t talking directly into the phone, though.

  Then I heard a woman kind of pleading and crying in the background, although it didn’t sound like Annie.

  A few seconds later, the guy said, “Goddamn it! Who turned this thing on?”

  And Annie’s cell phone clic
ked off.

  I tried calling it again.

  It went directly to voice mail.

  CHAPTER 9

  At first, I didn’t want to admit it; but Brandon pointed out to me that I had to report my call to Annie’s cell phone to someone in authority.

  I thought the guy answering the phone with a woman crying and pleading in the background meant that Annie was dead. Brandon pointed out to me that it didn’t mean that at all. For all we knew, Annie had lost her cell phone and this guy had picked it up without ever knowing anything about her.

  We doubted that last theory, though. We assumed the guy who answered the phone knew where Annie was.

  I decided to talk to Principal Lafferty.

  I wasn’t sure how that was going to go over and I wasn’t sure that I could trust him. I wasn’t absolutely sure that he wasn’t friends with my mother. She seemed to be working fairly regularly at the school, despite what I had told the police about her in front of him, but I wasn’t certain. I tried not to keep too close a track of her life. First of all, I had my own life to worry about and my own life was a complete mess with enough problems to keep me busy for a very long time. But, also, getting too involved with my mom’s life tended to completely overwhelm me. I had learned in both Al-Anon and Nar-Anon that I could be an incredible enabler. A long time ago, when I was much younger, I constantly tried to help my mom out, to fix our family by smoothing out all the bad situations she created. I cooked meals and made sure my mom ate, covered her up with blankets when she passed out on the couch at night, and called into work to say she was sick when she was actually too hungover to show up for work at the many jobs she had had over the years. One Al-Anon counselor in particular had pointed out to me that my mom never had any real reason to get better because I constantly put things right for her. Money was never a problem because Mom always seemed to hook up with a guy who supported her before our money ran out and I fixed everything else to keep our lives running smoothly. At the same time, I managed to keep up with my homework and did OK at school. I was a real fix-it gal. You broke it, I fixed it. Kind of like that. But I never had time to excel at anything. I wasn’t a stellar student; my artwork which I loved to create was never more than half-assed. I could never concentrate on anything. I was always pulled in a bazillion different directions, trying to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives.

  So, back to Principal Lafferty. I guessed he liked my mom enough to keep her on as a substitute teacher at the high school, although it looked like she was no longer the primary substitute for the Art teacher who was out on maternity leave. Another substitute, a young woman with wiry red hair and clothing that looked hand-painted, seemed to be teaching the Art class a lot more often than my mom. I didn’t know why. I didn’t ask. None of my business, I reminded my enabler self. Maybe my mom was still the primary substitute, but Principal Lafferty allowed her to call in sick a lot of days. Maybe she arranged to no longer be the main substitute through the kind of shocking lies she had used in the past. One time, she had actually told an employer that she had cancer and needed part-time hours to get chemotherapy. Yeah. And that boss arranged for her to keep the same health insurance she had had as a full-time employee.

  It had entered my mind that my mom might be having an affair with Principal Lafferty, although ... ugh ... I really couldn’t go there.

  My impression was that my mom was still a substitute teacher at our school, and mostly for Art class, because I saw her teaching in classrooms and especially teaching in the Art classroom quite a bit and, whenever I couldn’t get out of it, I actually rode to school with her, so I knew she was going into Central High School. I just didn’t know exactly how often. And I didn’t know if Principal Lafferty was too close to my mom for me to trust him with details of my life. But I wasn’t going to go to my mom. Or to the police. I needed to talk to an adult. I thought about going to Mr. Hoffman, but I suspected that every teacher would be required to report everything I said to Mr. Lafferty anyway, and I suspected Mr. Lafferty might be pissed that I didn’t go to him first. The guy seemed to have an ego.

  So, the day after I had called Annie’s cell phone, I went to Mr. Lafferty and told him all about the creepy guy on the other end of the line.

  Mr. Lafferty called the police.

  I sat in the Principal’s Waiting Room, swinging my feet back and forth like a little kid, watching all the troublemakers come in and out, the secretaries answer phones and file papers and sometimes offer me a hesitant smile.

  I was so bored.

  I wished I had a way to communicate with Brandon. I decided then and there that we had to fix that. He could communicate with me through the amulet, but I had no way to reach him to talk things over or get emotional support, other than speaking into the amulet and hoping he’d hear me. That had to change.

  As I was wishing I could turn on my cell phone in the school building to play an app game, two police officers walked into the Waiting Room.

  I immediately felt my heart start to race. Police officers made me nervous. I guess that my mother and I had been in so much trouble over the years, I always expected to be treated as a criminal.

  I also felt guilty. All the time. Accuse me of being a criminal, I’d probably fess up, even if I didn’t know what the crime was.

  One of the secretaries immediately greeted the officers and buzzed Principal Lafferty.

  The Principal came out of his office, shook the police officers’ hands, thanked them for coming so quickly.

  A police walkie-talkie spit out some clipped conversation. The officers ignored it. Nothing of importance to them, I guessed.

  Then Principal Lafferty turned to me and introduced me. My heart sped up so quickly and I probably held my breath too long, I don’t know, but I nearly passed out. How I got into Principal Lafferty’s office is a blur. I vaguely remember walking there, but in slow motion, like swimming underwater.

  Same for telling my story. I barely remember doing it.

  At the end of it all, though, I remember, clear as day, the one police officer, the one with serious brown eyes and crew-cut hair, telling me and Principal Lafferty, “We’ll have to take the phone into custody.”

  At first, my mind played tricks on me. I thought I had to go into custody. I slowed down the words, tossed them around in my mind, then concentrated on the exact order in which they had been pronounced: We’ll have to take the phone into custody.

  Ah, OK, the phone. Just the phone. Not me. Then I freaked. My phone. A teenager’s diary filled with personal secrets. Worse than a diary. It had all the stuff. All of it. The phone numbers of my friends. God. My mind raced. Phone numbers of guys I had had crushes on and had called just to hear their voice. What else was on there? Websites I had visited.

  “Ms. Griffin?”

  “Yes?” I looked up. Serious dark eyes with the muscular arms and a billy club and gun holster hanging from his waist was looking at me.

  He reached out a huge, broad hand. “May I have your phone?”

  I tried hard to keep my voice from cracking, so as not to sound guilty. It came out really soft and weak. I gave up my power, even as I asked, “Can I keep it for a day or so?”

  “No. We need to take your phone into custody right now, to help in our investigation with the missing girl, Anne Marie Green.”

  I felt horrible. Finding Annie should be my only concern. But I balked. “I could hand it over first thing tomorrow. It’s just that ... umm ... I have a lot of phone numbers I need to copy down. A lot of my friends ... umm ... I don’t know their numbers by heart, so ... umm ... if I could copy them down, I could still call them.” I paused, then added, “Some of them I need to contact about Annie, see if they heard anything.”

  The other police officer played good cop. He looked the part, too: kind of Irish, freckle-faced, bright blue eyes. He smiled at me and said, “I’m sure your friends will find a way to contact you if they hear anything about Annie’s possible whereabouts.”

  I handed
over my phone.

  Then I said I had a really bad headache and Principal Lafferty let me go home for the rest of the day.

  I walked home, to spend time completely alone, just thinking.

  I realized then the depth to which I would miss my cell phone. I couldn’t text, receive calls, or listen to music. My fingers got itchy. I kept imagining I heard a ring or buzz and kept thinking that I felt a vibration in my jacket pocket. I kept reaching in there for my phone to see if I had gotten a phone call. It was like losing a limb or part of my brain. It felt a bit like I had once had a computer chip implanted in my brain and someone had yanked it out, kind of like the sensation of having a word you couldn’t remember on the tip of your tongue but not being able to access Google to look it up.

  I felt horrible.

  All afternoon, I tried to think of a way to tell my mother that my cell phone had been confiscated by the police. Although she didn’t take much notice of my life, I knew police involvement with our family would shake her up. She’d have drugs to hide. Not to mention how upset she’d be about the money. My cell phone had cost a lot of money and there was no guarantee I’d ever get it back.